Trump Tries Deranged Defense in Stormy Daniels Hush-Money Trial

Trump is trying any legal defense he can get his hands on, and making up entirely new ones.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday outside his hush-money trial, Trump tried a new defense: Even if he’s found guilty, he didn’t commit a crime or at least shouldn’t be punished for it.

“I shouldn’t be in a courthouse,” said the former president, clearly spinning out over having to attend his first criminal court case of many.

“Even if he was guilty of something, there is no crime,” Trump told reporters outside the courthouse, speaking in the third person.

It’s unclear what Trump means here, but it’s clear he’s making it up on the fly. Trump is accused of 34 felony charges over falsifying business records for his payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, in exchange for their silence ahead of the 2016 election. Something that is absolutely a crime.

“We want delays,” Trump added in the press conference. Unfortunately, he won’t get them.

Judge Juan Manuel Merchan decided at the hearing on Thursday that the trial will begin March 25 as planned.

Meanwhile, the South Carolina Republican primary is less than 10 days away, and Trump is stressed about how to make it to all his court appearances and campaign stops.

“How can you run for election and be sitting in a courthouse in Manhattan all day long?”

We’re asking the same question.

After Republican Mazi Melesa Pilip lost the New York special election to replace George Santos’s empty House seat, Representative Matt Gaetz made sure to take time to tear down his fellow party member.

“It turns out DEI isn’t a real good strategy for Republican candidate recruitment,” Gaetz said in an interview with Newsmax.

Gaetz went on to trash Pilip, who was born in Ethiopia and holds both American and Israeli citizenship, calling her a “very foolish woman.” Donald Trump used the exact same words in a Truth Social post Tuesday night, and added that Pilip lost because she did not endorse him.

Similarly, Gaetz’s main line of attack, besides dog whistles, was criticizing Pilip for not fully embracing Trump. “Look, if you don’t want to run as a Donald Trump Republican, what are you even doing running in 2024 on our side? Get on board.”

“George Santos stood with President Trump, backed the America First agenda, and he ultimately prevailed, so now the very New Yorkers who threw George Santos out see their own ranks diminished and they welcome back Democrat Tom Suozzi,” Gaetz continued.

There are plenty of reasons Republicans lost this seat: Santos’s antics, the GOP’s do-nothing disaster of a term, or even the fact that the district often leans Democratic— but DEI isn’t the boogeyman Gaetz makes it out to be. 

With Santos replaced by a Democrat, the House GOP majority will further shrink. The razor-thin majority means even more tension for Speaker Mike Johnson, who was already struggling to get his party to pass any legislation.

Things suddenly don’t look so good for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, whose statements on the duration of her relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade was directly contradicted by a friend taking the stand on Thursday.

Robin Yeartie, a college friend of Willis’s and former Fulton county district attorney’s office employee, told the court that Willis’s relationship with Wade began in 2019—three years earlier than the couple claims, and before Wade was hired on in the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants. Yeartie added that the couple’s relationship remained constant.

“You have no doubt that their romantic relationship was in effect from 2019 until the last time you spoke with her?” asked defense lawyer Ashleigh Merchant.

“No doubt,” Yeartie said.

Yeartie also mentioned that she had stopped speaking to Willis in March 2022 over a “situation” that led to the end of her friendship with Willis and a professional fork in the road—resign or be fired.

Meanwhile, Trump and several of his co-defendants have used the romantic entanglement as a legal basis to request that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee disqualify her and throw out the case entirely.

In a court filing, Trump’s legal team alleged that Willis and Wade had an “improper intimate personal relationship,” taking lavish vacations including Caribbean cruises paid for in part by $650,000 that Wade billed Willis’s office to prosecute the case.

Willis has denied those allegations, claiming that their relationship began in 2022, after Wade was introduced to the case, and that they each paid their own share of the vacation.

“The state has admitted a relationship existed, and so what remains to be proven is the existence and extent of any financial benefit, if there even was one,” McAfee said.

Willis’s removal from the case would be an incredible blow to one of four criminal trials that Trump is anticipated to undergo before the 2024 general election, adding an additional delay that may continue to prolong the amount of time before the former president is tried on racketeering charges related to his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

Donald Trump’s recent memory failures sure do look like some kind of cognitive decline. In the last few months, Trump has mixed up President Joe Biden with former President Barack Obama, slurred his words, bragged about his favorite type of violent death and that he calls corn “non-liquid gold,” insisted you need voter ID to buy bread, and confused his GOP competitor Nikki Haley for California Representative Nancy Pelosi, claiming that the former failed to act during January 6.

But during a campaign rally on Wednesday, Trump had a new excuse for all that, claiming all of his short circuits are actually just sarcastic jokes.

“But when I say that Obama is the president of our country bah bah bah, they go, ‘He doesn’t know that Spiden [sic], he doesn’t know.’ So it’s very hard to be sarcastic,” Trump said.

“When I interpose—cause I’m not a Nikki fan, and I’m not a Pelosi fan. And when I purposely interpose names, they said, ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki. From Tricky Nikki. Tricky Nikki. He didn’t know.’ I interposed,” he added, seemingly forgetting the definition of the word “interpose,” which per Merriam-Webster means to put oneself between or intrude.

“And they make a big deal out of it. I said, ‘No, no, I think they both stink. They have something in common. They both stink.’ And remember this: When I make a statement like that about Nikki, that means she will never be running for vice president. She will never be running [unintelligible] vice president,” he added.

Since a special counsel investigation accused 81-year-old President Joe Biden of having a feeble mind, Trump—who is just four years younger—has desperately been trying to reframe the narrative, accusing Biden of being “too incompetent” but “not too old.”

Even Russian President Vladimir Putin wasn’t impressed by Tucker Carlson’s pathetic attempts to interview him.

The ousted Fox News host was in Moscow last week, when he sat down with Putin for what he claimed would be a hard-hitting, unbiased interview. In reality, it was anything but.

Speaking to Russian state television on Wednesday, Putin said that prior to the interview, he believed that Carlson would be an aggressive interviewer, a dangerous person who would “ask so-called sharp questions.”

“And I wasn’t just ready for that, I wanted it, because it would have given me the opportunity to respond sharply in kind,” Putin added. “But he chose a different tactic.”

“He tried to interrupt me several times, but still, surprisingly for a Western journalist, he turned out to be patient and listened to my lengthy dialogues, especially those related to history, and didn’t give me reason to do what I was ready for. So frankly, I didn’t get complete satisfaction from this interview.”

Indeed, as Putin claimed, the interview seemed more like a propagandistic history lesson than anything else.

The interview lasted over a grueling two hours, during which Carlson avoided topics like Russian war crimes in Ukraine, political prisoners, or even Russia’s upcoming presidential election. “Are we having a talk show or a serious conversation?” Putin asked.

Before the interview even hit the halfway mark, Putin was interviewing Carlson and mocking Carlson’s CIA dreams.

The whole thing was longer than Carlson’s previous self-published interviews with Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The only person Tucker Carlson’s interviewed for longer? Alleged rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate.

Carlson claimed the goal of the interview is to enable Americans to understand Russia’s view of the war. “He fulfilled his plan,” said Putin, “but how meaningful it was in the end is not for me to judge.”